During the pandemic, it wasn't too uncommon to hear the criticism that economists should stay in their lane when it comes to issues related to health. So I thought I would write a short piece discussing what role I have had as an applied (agricultural) economist working in the healthcare space for almost a decade now.
Economics is the study of people's choices and how they are made compatible. At a high level, agricultural economics focuses on choices related to food, fiber, natural resources, and energy production and consumption. This makes the intersection of food, health, and the environment an interesting space in agricultural economics.
How do choices in this space impact health? What factors lead individuals to make healthy choices? In graduate school I specifically focused on why people seem to pick and choose their science and the role of evidence in food choices and attitudes toward food technology. What is the role of information and disinformation in the formation of consumer preferences and the choices they make? How can we design better policies, products, services, interventions, or choice architectures for better outcomes? How can we communicate science and risk more effectively? And, what are the best approaches in experimental design and causal inference to measure the impact in these areas? How do we bring this all together to make better decisions as individuals, business leaders, and as a society? At an applied level, which is where I work, this is not so much about making a novel contribution to the literature or advancing the field as much as it is about implementation - applying the principals of economics to develop solutions or provide frameworks to solve or better understand questions and problems in this space.
This line of reasoning has value not just in the context of food choices but for a myriad of behaviors related to healthcare at both the patient and provider level. From a business perspective, this is about how to identify opportunities to move resources from a lower to a higher valued use, and how we monetize behavior change. Of course applying this economic lens also requires bringing an ethical perspective to the table as well, which is important when we consider all of the tradeoffs involved in human decision making.
When we are faced with wicked problems that may have alternative solutions, we can't just jump directly form the science to a cure, better policy, or product or service. We learned from the pandemic the difference between having a vaccine and having people get vaccinated. At the end of the day there are no solutions really, only tradeoffs, and we need a framework for understanding those tradeoffs so we can make better decisions about food and health. That is squarely in the lane of theoretical and applied economists.
Related Posts and Readings
Why Study Economics / Applied Economics
The Convergence of AI, Life Sciences, and Healthcare
The Economics of Innovation in Biopharma
Science Communication for Business and Non-technical Audiences
The Value of Business Experiments
Statistics is a way of thinking not a toolbox
Causal Decision Making with Non-Causal Models
Rational Irrationality and Behavioral Economic Frameworks for Combating Vaccine Hesitancy
Consumer Perceptions, Misinformation, and Vaccine Hesitancy
Fat Tails, The Precautionary Principle, and GMOs
Innovation, Disruption and Low(er) Carbon Beef
Examining Changes in Healthy Days After Health Coaching. Cole, S., Zbikowski, S. M., Renda, A., Wallace, A., Dobbins, J. M., & Bogard, M. American Journal of Health Promotion. (2018)
Intrapersonal Variation in Goal Setting and Achievement in Health Coaching: Cross-Sectional Retrospective Analysis. Wallace A.M., Bogard M.T., Zbikowski S.M. J Med Internet Res 2018;20(1):e32
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